Scientific creationism

Scientific creationism refers to efforts by the creation science movement to present Creationism as a valid scientific hypothesis and to prove it by scientific means. One motivation of the movement is to gain support for teaching of creationism as an alternative to the theory of evolution in public schools, or, failing that, to downplay or eliminate the teaching of the theory of evolution.

While many Christians and the vast majority of biologists accept the theory of evolution and natural selection as the most likely explanation of speciation, many nonscientists do not. Only about 5% of scientists generally and fewer than 0.1% of biologists give creation science any credence, usually dismissing it as either false or not falsifiable.

Intelligent Design is one framework for scientific creationism; another is based on Biblical literalism, which requires that the Universe is young. Advances in geology and astronomy in the last 100 years have made this hard. Other scientific approaches to creationism involve finding problems in the fossil record such as "missing links" which disprove evolution; this approach has also become more difficult as these holes have been filled in.

Many scientists consider the term "scientific creationism" to be an oxymoron, since they see its very nature as incompatible with the generally understood scientific method. Modern science is based on the concept of methodological naturalism which aims to explain the universe in terms of observable and testable natural systems. Unfortunately, the Judeo-Christian concept of God by its very definition, is not observable and its influence is not testable since the number of points of its possible influence are infinite with the particulars unknown. Scientists generally believe that the term was created out of a desire to get creationism back into United States school curricula as science rather than religion. The First Amendment to the United States Constitution prohibits public schools from teaching religious beliefs as facts; the relevant cases are Epperson v. Arkansas and Edwards v Aguillard.

Some arguments proposed by creationists are:

• There are structures in species, such as the woodpecker's hyoid and the eyes of Strepsiptera, for which some claim there is no very obvious mechanism by which they could have developed gradually.
• Rock strata have in some places apparently been laid down out of order.
• The existence of strata and fossils could be taken to suggest that they were laid down catastrophically.
• Some people claim that the speed of light has changed over time, thus changing the speed of radioactive decay. Since both the meter and the second are defined in terms of light waves, this makes no sense.
• Radioactive dates may be thought unreliable if they assume that certain isotopes were not present in the rock when formed.
• While a few thousands of years elapsed on earth, millions of years may have elapsed in the wider universe. This argument is based on a non-standard interpretation of the theory of general relativity.